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Revealing the Layers of Cuba’s Architecture

The Cuban government may be sending a subtle message to potential American tourists that preserved architecture and antiques collections are viewable throughout the island. Four new coffee table books on the subject have been published, and the authors report few restrictions on what they could document.

The historian Michael Connors and the photographer Brent Winebrenner did get shooed away from one 1840s palacio in Havana. “It is ironically the headquarters of the Institute of the History of the Communist Movement and the Socialist Revolution, and therefore strictly off limits to foreigners,” Mr. Connors writes in “The Splendor of Cuba: 450 Years of Architecture and Interiors” (Rizzoli).

The books show that buildings in government hands, at least, have held up well, and the imprints of American and European designers and clients remain detectable. “Great Houses of Havana: A Century of Cuban Style” (the Monacelli Press), by the architect Hermes Mallea, and “Inside Havana” (Taschen), by the historian Julio César Pérez Hernández, both devote chapters to the American tobacco tycoon Mark Pollack’s Renaissance stone house, completed around 1930. Visiting dignitaries now spend the night amid its murals of putti and gilded mosaics of seaweed and palm trees.

Conditions there have deteriorated somewhat since Pollack’s day. In the two-story living room, Mr. Mallea writes, “a bronze grille is all that remains of the original pipe organ.”

Mr. Connors’s book shows Louis Comfort Tiffany floral lamps set on end tables at a countess’s 1920s house, furnished by the Parisian firm Maison Jansen. (The property was turned into a museum in 1964, soon after the countess fled the Communist takeover.) The Taschen and Monacelli books depict an octagonal light fixture by the French glassmaker René Lalique in the sunroom of a 1920s villa, now the House of Friendship.

Cubans without government backing, however, can barely maintain their buildings. “Paint has relentlessly chipped off walls and haphazardly peeled from portraits, ghostly rectangles of lighter color glimmer on walls where paintings once had hung, beach chairs with webbed seats and backs stand in for fine-turned furniture,” the critic Vicki Goldberg writes in “Havana” (Prestel), a collection of Michael Eastman’s photos of moldering homes and streetscapes.

Photo

Michael Eastman's “#167, Havana,” from “Havana,” one of four new books on the architecture and faded style of Cuba.Credit
Michael Eastman/Barry Friedman, Ltd.

Jane Katcher has spent more than $100,000 producing two sumptuous books about her American folk art collection. When the volumes were arrayed on a table during a recent interview at a cafe near her Manhattan apartment, a waitress hovered and said: “Beautiful books! So great!”

“People can call it great indulgence, but I think it has pushed scholarship forward,” she said.

She brought in about 20 scholars to write the essays, including Paul S. D’Ambrosio, the president of the Fenimore museum, and the Americana dealers David A. Schorsch and Eileen M. Smiles, who advise Dr. Katcher on her purchases. Her interests include weathervanes, clocks, quilts, high school award certificates and albums with keepsakes made of human hair.

The topics in the second volume range from Wilkinson Limner, a Massachusetts painter who may have served prison time for counterfeiting, to Amy Cohn, a storekeeper in Nevada who dressed in American Indian beadwork to help market willow baskets by the Washoe weaver Louisa Keyser.

Dr. Katcher started collecting in the 1970s, as a young doctor dealing with children sometimes facing a dire prognosis. Folk art’s cheeriness provided “relief to a very serious job,” she said. Her husband, Gerald Katcher, a banker, patiently supports her hobby. “I would call him ‘the enabler,’ ” she said.

Based on the books’ detailed descriptions of provenances, nosy readers can calculate what Mr. Schorsch and Ms. Smiles have spent at auction on Dr. Katcher’s behalf. Among the top recent lots is the cover image on the second volume: a 1740s portrait of a bride in Kingston, N.Y., which sold for $1.1 million at Keno Auctions last year in Stamford, Conn.

A version of this article appears in print on September 30, 2011, on Page C31 of the New York edition with the headline: Revealing the Layers Of Cuba’s Architecture. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe